With a little over three months until the election (and the Referendum!), it seems about time to get people thinking about what they want in a voting system, and what voting system on offer comes closest to .
In that regard, I've been working on an on-line tool for Public Address. And I'm at the point where I need some programming assistance. So I'm hoping one of you, or someone one of you can send our way, will be able to help. It's slightly more than your standard "what voting system am I?" Facebook Quiz, but as a piece of progamming, I imagine it'll be pretty basic.
Please contact me (or Russell) if you know your way around a computer and have a few hours to spare the cause of informed public debate. I suspect Russell can even throw in some coffee :-)
p.s. I'm not the only person trying to use the Internet to inform people know about the effects of the different voting systems on offer: Geoffrey Pritchard and Mark Wilson, of the Centre for Mathematical Social Science at the University of Auckland have created a nifty simulator: key in different voting figures, and it will show the final parliament under each of the five systems. I thought of fact-checking it, as there are some assumptions I'd take issue with: they use the party vote, and ignore the electorate vote, which tends to suggest the Maori Party wouldn't have gotten any seats under most other systems at past elections, and implies that had the 2002 election been held under first-past-the-post Labour would have gotten 110 of the 120 seats, but it's still worth a look!